Sex Museums : The Politics and Performance of Display / Jennifer Tyburczy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tyburczy, Jennifer, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sex in art--Museums--Western countries.

Sex in art.

Erotic art--Museums--Western countries.

Erotic art.

Sex in art--Museums--Mexico--Mexico City.

Erotic art--Museums--Mexico--Mexico City.

Sex in art--Exhibitions.

Erotic art--Exhibitions.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (313 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2016]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Winner of the 29th annual Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies All museums are sex museums. In Sex Museums, Jennifer Tyburczy takes a hard look at the formation of Western sexuality-particularly how categories of sexual normalcy and perversity are formed-and asks what role museums have played in using display as a technique for disciplining sexuality. Most museum exhibits, she argues, assume that white, patriarchal heterosexuality and traditional structures of intimacy, gender, and race represent national sexual culture for their visitors. Sex Museums illuminates the history of such heteronormativity at most museums and proposes alternative approaches for the future of public display projects, while also offering the reader curatorial tactics-what she calls queer curatorship-for exhibiting diverse sexualities in the twenty-first century. Tyburczy shows museums to be sites of culture-war theatrics, where dramatic civic struggles over how sex relates to public space, genealogies of taste and beauty, and performances of sexual identity are staged. Delving into the history of erotic artifacts, she analyzes how museums have historically approached the collection and display of the material culture of sex, which poses complex moral, political, and logistical dilemmas for the Western museum. Sex Museums unpacks the history of the museum and its intersections with the history of sexuality to argue that the Western museum context-from its inception to the present-marks a pivotal site in the construction of modern sexual subjectivity.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Preface: A Fire in My Belly

Acknowledgments

Introduction: All Museums Are Sex Museums

One. Hard-Core Collecting and Erotic Exhibitionism

Two. Nudes and Nazis; or, Surveying Sex through Violence in Museums

Three. WARNING: Dissident Sex in the Museum

Four. Touring the Sex Museum

Five. Exhibiting the Sexual Modern

Six. Queer Curatorship

Coda: When Sex Museums Fail

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226315386

022631538X

OCLC:

930602607